updated 10:00 pm EDT, Wed April 3, 2013

New platter technology reduces heat, energy use, cost

Seagate has announced the availability of a new 4TB 3.5-inch desktop form-factor drive for consumers. While 4TB capacities have been available previously either through striped dual-drive configurations or single-drive options, the newly named STBD4000400 "Desktop HDD.15" (formerly Barracuda) SATA 3 (6Gbps) drive is the first to use 1TB platters.

The drive has 64MB of cache memory, with a rotational velocity of 5,900rpm. Seagate claims that the drive will still offer excellent performance with sustained writing speed of 145MBps. The drive ships with DiskWizard software, allowing it to work with Windows XP. UEFI BIOS is required to use the high capacity drive as a boot disk.

The drive is available now at retail. The drive in a USB 3.0 or eSATA case generally runs for $220, with a bare drive retailing for $195.